By Peter J. Brown
As broadcasters and direct-to-home (DTH) service providers prepare for the future, the migration from the established MPEG-2 encoding solution to a much more bandwidth- efficient solution seems almost inevitable. With demand for bandwidth-hungry, high-definition (HD) TV content growing in particular, many industry players and observers see the H.264 or MPEG-4 Part 10 standard as the most attractive solution.
The H.264/MPEG-4 standard, also known as Advanced Video Coding (AVC), holds an edge over Microsoft's Windows Media Video 9 encoding platform, industry officials say. This Microsoft solution, better known as VC-1, has reached the critical step of Final Committee Draft status in the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers' Video Compression Technology Committee, meaning that all the platform's technical issues have been resolved. But since the terms of VC-1 licensing have yet to be announced, nobody really knows if the technology is going to be competitive, says David Price, vice president, business development at Harmonic Inc.'s Convergent Systems Division.
"Although AVC and VC-1 are virtually identical in terms of performance, it seems like the big money is behind AVC, with nine out of 10 of new operators opting for AVC," Price says. "It has become the focus of silicon, set-top box (STB) and encoder manufacturers alike." VC-1 has its roots in the more Internet Protocol (IP)-intensive personal computer environment, and for this reason, stands somewhat apart from the other two dominant broadcast-centric encoding platforms, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 AVC, as a more IPTV-specific solution. "Although Microsoft has not got a winner with their VC-1 codec, they clearly have scored a home run with their IPTV middleware and ecosystem. The user experience brought about through their tremendous graphical user interface, taking advantage of the fundamental capabilities of an IP-based delivery system, will set the standard for how people view [and pay for] their video information," Price says.
The demand for VC-1 is more evident in Europe and Asia than in the United States, says Lisa Hobbs, senior director of marketing at Tandberg Television Inc. "Swisscom's Bluewin is using it for an IPTV-based service and Malaysia's MiTV project also just announced they will be deploying it for an IPTV network," says Hobbs. "It is true that we have seen a move toward AVC technology by satellite DTH [direct-to-home] broadcasters on a global basis, but VC-1 continues to play elsewhere."
While VC-1 has been selected by companies like Verizon V CAST, Crown Castle Mobile Media and BT Livetime to drive dynamic wireless video services, Microsoft continues to search for its first significant digital broadcasting service (DBS) or DTH customer. Still, VC-1 remains a force in an unpredictable multimedia marketplace, which appears eager to embrace such things as hybrid Digital Video Broadcasting for Handhelds (DVB-H)-based delivery solutions. Joe Powell, lead product manager for Windows Digital Media at Microsoft, says that, among other things, VC-1 can scale from wireless delivery to HD resolutions, all at very economic bit rates.
"Because Windows Media Video 9 advanced profile elementary streams can be delivered over conventional MPEG-2 transport streams, VC-1 is a great choice for satellite operators who are looking to the benefits that advanced codecs [coder-decoder] provide, yet do not want to significantly overhaul their infrastructure," says Powell. "Today, most of the digital cable, satellite and over-the-air services use MPEG-2 systems for packetization, multiplexing and synchronization of audio and video. Consequently, most of the STBs have the capability to process MPEG-2 transport streams. Microsoft makes it possible to use the Windows Media Audio and Video codecs with any media file container on any platform. Compared to MPEG-2, VC-1 can deliver the same quality for standard-definition (SD) and HD video in half to a third of the bit rate depending on the content."
Demand thus far suggests that both AVC and VC-1 will remain firmly on everyone's radar screen for the foreseeable future.
"We are getting requirements for VC-1 as well as MPEG-4. That is why we designed the Universal Encoder platform to provide the flexibility in supporting one or the other," says Mario Rainville, associate vice president, product marketing at Princeton, N.J.-based Scopus Network Technologies. "As for the standards race, things are certainly getting more crisp from where they were a year ago, but I would not go as far as saying that the competitive nature of one standard or the other will fade out soon."
"MPEG-2 is still the standard video codec for professional applications," says NDSatcom spokesman Peter Neu "MPEG-4 AVC will follow for lower speed applications in the enterprise VSAT market in particular. While we see VC-1 more in the commercial market and end user business We expect MPEG-4 to take off in 2006."
Email
Comments
Print
Reuse
